6 ms·

When the government in Germany does IT projects, they usually burn millions of Euros even for simple projects. And then, years after the planned rollout, the pr

by 101404 7y ago

When the government in Germany does IT projects, they usually burn millions of Euros even for simple projects. And then, years after the planned rollout, the project is still unfinished and no politician wants to touch it anymore. My favorites was the "special email inbox for lawyers". So, I am somewhat hesitant to let the EU develop a chat client.

mcv 7y ago
The Dutch government is also often terrible at managing IT projects. It seems an industry has evolved to game the public procurement rules required by the EU. Those companies just leech money for never-ending IT projects that tend to be over budget, over time, and working poorly.
- tomatocracy 7y ago
  I think it's more that one of the consequences of painful public procurement processes is that they incentivise public officials to avoid procurement as much as possible. This leads to larger/maximalist projects being specified and a proliferation of "framework agreements" under which small projects are undertaken, both of which seem to benefit the large incumbents disproportionately.
- jeltz 7y ago
  Having worked at a company in public procurement I would say that matches my experience. I would say we were relatively honest compared to some of our competitors, but there were almost no incentives for us developers to do a good job other than our personal morals and everyone including us were more or less gaming the system. I hated working there because I felt like a parasite just making the world worse. The in-hosue IT of our customer would probably have done a better job if they had just been allowed to hire some guys instead of having to go through an easily gameable procurement procedure. Not because they would have been more competent, but because they would have not have had perverse incentives.
  - j7ake 7y ago
    This story is fascinating, do you know where I can read more about public procurement?
    - iudqnolq 7y ago
      For a semi-fictional humorous take on American military procurement watch the movie The Pentagon Wars
      - MrMorden 7y ago
        Is that one more accurate than "Joint Session" (Veep S4E1)?
        iudqnolq 7y ago
        Never saw that Veep episode. It's based on a book with the same title by a whistleblower, and my understanding is they dramatize the specifics but the fundamentals gist is true if a little more complicated. For example, in the movie the main character thinks for a while and then decides to use the military rules against his opponents so he asks his secretary to get him the rulebook and figures out a rule with a loophole. I think in reality he used a generally similar loophole to get the word out in combination with a lot of other strategies, but he didn't figure it out from staring at "the rulebook" for a few hours one night.
- minusf 7y ago
  at least the Dutch sites work. try a post communist country gov site and you'll start appreciating it right away.
  - mcv 7y ago
    I don't doubt there are countries that are worse at it, but "the Dutch sites work" is not always true, or sometimes true for questionable definitions of "work". I mean, we've got this nice secure login system for government sites: DigiD, which works fine. So you need that to submit your taxes. A few years ago, it turned out you needed any valid DigiD to submit your taxes, not necessarily your own. There are tons of other sites that cost many millions, and resulted in an atrocious user experience. And some projects simply failed after going way over budget.
    - Avamander 7y ago
      I wouldn't really call DigiD secure, it doesn't seem to be open-source. Plus, rolling some own protocol/crypto instead of using PKI, that has immense effort behind it to keep secure, is not a good thing. Estonia has a similar solution, but "Smart-ID" was created after PKI was fully rolled out, it's terrible compared to that. Centralized, unverifiable, stores secrets insecurely, does some cryptographic bullshit. The two solutions somehow seem very related.
      - mcv 7y ago
        Possibly. I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt because I haven't heard of any problems with DigiD itself, but you could certainly question whether that benefit is deserved here. But my point is that even if DigiD is secure, that's still not going to help you when the tax service uses it incorrectly.
      - skeletal88 7y ago
        Can you explain why Smart-ID is bad? It is terrible compared to what, PKI, our ID card, the mobile-id system? What kind of bullshit does it do? I haven't heard any such criticism about that system before, so it would be interesting to hear. I've been using it for years, it's easy to use and there haven't been any security problems with it. The company that developed it is trying to export it to other countries as well.
- mattrp 7y ago
  s/Dutch/all/g
- ptsneves 7y ago
  In Portugal there is this thing called viactt which is a crappy reinvention of email. The issue is that it is mandated that official communications with the state be done like through it. It emulates the conventional mail so much that the "letter" contains a picture of the stamps. If you are a company it is the official way of communication. It was done as part of a modernization initiative but now everybody just hates it due to its general uselessness and rare usage.
DelightOne 7y ago
Thats why it should be done like darpa, choosing the best in the end.
- neuronic 7y ago
  Yes, selection should happen after the fact. Build at least an MVP with all critical functionality implemented in working stages. Then use that for the competition to get the contract. Preselection is hot garbage, as proven time and time again. Of course mechanism to mitigate the upfront cost of participating in such a competition should be implemented but in the end it should turn out cheaper/more worthwhile since a working MVP already exists by time of selection.
  - close04 7y ago
    I’m as certain as I can be that few if any companies will be willing to invest (hundreds of) millions into projects to build some custom solution just to risk losing the bid in the end. And in top of that they would have a product that may have 0 demand elsewhere. Imagine if your employer told you they’ll hire you after you successfully deliver a project to test your worth. You’d think it’s a joke. And anyway most costs are incurred during the lifetime of the project, after you proved yours is the best solution, with endless change requests, delays that require additional money, etc. The companies bidding usually have far more experience at syphoning money than the client has at holding on to it.
    - miskin 7y ago
      This is true. What I see in my country is that initial product is maybe expensive, but still somehow acceptable. Problem is that, for some reason unknown to me, government does not gain rights to modify implemented solution and can't bring in another vendor to implement either next phase or do maintenance of the solution. And this introduces many years long vendor lock-in that pays off.
  - saber6 7y ago
    > Preselection is hot garbage, as proven time and time again. Oh come on bro you don’t like the f35? ;)
imtringued 7y ago
I always wonder how these projects can be so expensive. Heck, they are so expensive you could just order two companies to deliver a product and pit them against each other so that there is a strong incentive to deliver a working product.
- johannes1234321 7y ago
  Such projects are expensive since it's not only development but also rollout including training of users. The development is also more expensive than in other areas since there is need for documentation. And then there is a flaw in the process: Producing the software has to be done via some bidding process. For writing the requirements documents they already rely on companies, which can add clauses making it hard for competitors, after that the lowest bidder wins. In case there is a competitor and not some big player like T-Systems as the only one the offers typically are "optimistic" meaning that at some point in time the budget will run out and extra budget has to be granted (or the project would fail, which doesn't look good and they'd have to restart the whole process, thus wait another two years) and there a "smart" company can find quite a few extra costs. ("Oh wait, you updated from windows XP to 10, we have to redo a lot and then re-twst and re-certify") It's a game some companies can play quite well. That all said: Software is expensive. Gathering requirements is hard. Bureaucracy, which among other things tries to prevent corruption, causes extra work.
  - berkes 7y ago
    That, and they are expensive, because people expect them to be expensive. When, say, the national Police asks companies to come up with sofware to manage contact details for all employees, you could come up with "Install and Configure SomeOpenSourceCRM on a VPS" for €3000. Whereas typically some Enterprise Consultancy quotes a factor hundred of that to "integrate" it in a crappy way. I've worked in such projects, for governments. The overhead is ridiculous. the NIH-syndrome is rampant. The specs and "but this is how we do things"-requirements are cut in stone. Very often a evening of tuning some Open Source tool could suffice; But either some rule disallowing the language/server/deploy-speed, or some manager disliking it because last year they decided that from now on everything must be Java+XML, or you need at least three weeks of meetings before you are allowed to even start. This is not a joke. I've had a simple off-the-shelve Rails tool cut down, because "we don't allow dynamic languages". I've had projects delayed with 3+ weeks because "we require a deploy-window to be announced 21 days in advance" and I've worked as only developer on a project with four(!) managers managing me. That is why government projects are expensive: a catch22: "Because they are".
rorykoehler 7y ago
They don't have to do it. Just pay an established tech startup to do it via EU grants.
usrusr 7y ago
On the other hand, German public money had been the most important sponsor of GPG for quite a while. Unfortunately that stopped long ago, I guess all the reasons for that can be broken down to "it was too cheap" in one way or another... When you try to buy software like this through conventional state procurement mechanism you'll inevitably waste a lot of money, but it would be really cheap to "grow" it through supporting an environment where that can happen. Why doesn't Werner Koch have a position in academia? Third party funding of whole departments is commonplace and is always a blind bet trusting that the grantees will come up with something rewarding.
brazzy 7y ago
Do consider that you never read an article "obscure government IT project delivered fully working and only slightly delayed" because that isn't attention-grabbing enough for newspapers to bother with, not because it never happens.

by 101404 7y ago

mcv 7y ago

The Dutch government is also often terrible at managing IT projects. It seems an industry has evolved to game the public procurement rules required by the EU. Those companies just leech money for never-ending IT projects that tend to be over budget, over time, and working poorly.

tomatocracy 7y ago
I think it's more that one of the consequences of painful public procurement processes is that they incentivise public officials to avoid procurement as much as possible. This leads to larger/maximalist projects being specified and a proliferation of "framework agreements" under which small projects are undertaken, both of which seem to benefit the large incumbents disproportionately.
jeltz 7y ago
Having worked at a company in public procurement I would say that matches my experience. I would say we were relatively honest compared to some of our competitors, but there were almost no incentives for us developers to do a good job other than our personal morals and everyone including us were more or less gaming the system. I hated working there because I felt like a parasite just making the world worse. The in-hosue IT of our customer would probably have done a better job if they had just been allowed to hire some guys instead of having to go through an easily gameable procurement procedure. Not because they would have been more competent, but because they would have not have had perverse incentives.
- j7ake 7y ago
  This story is fascinating, do you know where I can read more about public procurement?
  - iudqnolq 7y ago
    For a semi-fictional humorous take on American military procurement watch the movie The Pentagon Wars
    - MrMorden 7y ago
      Is that one more accurate than "Joint Session" (Veep S4E1)?
      - iudqnolq 7y ago
        Never saw that Veep episode. It's based on a book with the same title by a whistleblower, and my understanding is they dramatize the specifics but the fundamentals gist is true if a little more complicated. For example, in the movie the main character thinks for a while and then decides to use the military rules against his opponents so he asks his secretary to get him the rulebook and figures out a rule with a loophole. I think in reality he used a generally similar loophole to get the word out in combination with a lot of other strategies, but he didn't figure it out from staring at "the rulebook" for a few hours one night.
minusf 7y ago
at least the Dutch sites work. try a post communist country gov site and you'll start appreciating it right away.
- mcv 7y ago
  I don't doubt there are countries that are worse at it, but "the Dutch sites work" is not always true, or sometimes true for questionable definitions of "work". I mean, we've got this nice secure login system for government sites: DigiD, which works fine. So you need that to submit your taxes. A few years ago, it turned out you needed any valid DigiD to submit your taxes, not necessarily your own. There are tons of other sites that cost many millions, and resulted in an atrocious user experience. And some projects simply failed after going way over budget.
  - Avamander 7y ago
    I wouldn't really call DigiD secure, it doesn't seem to be open-source. Plus, rolling some own protocol/crypto instead of using PKI, that has immense effort behind it to keep secure, is not a good thing. Estonia has a similar solution, but "Smart-ID" was created after PKI was fully rolled out, it's terrible compared to that. Centralized, unverifiable, stores secrets insecurely, does some cryptographic bullshit. The two solutions somehow seem very related.
    - mcv 7y ago
      Possibly. I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt because I haven't heard of any problems with DigiD itself, but you could certainly question whether that benefit is deserved here. But my point is that even if DigiD is secure, that's still not going to help you when the tax service uses it incorrectly.
    - skeletal88 7y ago
      Can you explain why Smart-ID is bad? It is terrible compared to what, PKI, our ID card, the mobile-id system? What kind of bullshit does it do? I haven't heard any such criticism about that system before, so it would be interesting to hear. I've been using it for years, it's easy to use and there haven't been any security problems with it. The company that developed it is trying to export it to other countries as well.
mattrp 7y ago
s/Dutch/all/g
ptsneves 7y ago
In Portugal there is this thing called viactt which is a crappy reinvention of email. The issue is that it is mandated that official communications with the state be done like through it. It emulates the conventional mail so much that the "letter" contains a picture of the stamps. If you are a company it is the official way of communication. It was done as part of a modernization initiative but now everybody just hates it due to its general uselessness and rare usage.

DelightOne 7y ago

Thats why it should be done like darpa, choosing the best in the end.

neuronic 7y ago
Yes, selection should happen after the fact. Build at least an MVP with all critical functionality implemented in working stages. Then use that for the competition to get the contract. Preselection is hot garbage, as proven time and time again. Of course mechanism to mitigate the upfront cost of participating in such a competition should be implemented but in the end it should turn out cheaper/more worthwhile since a working MVP already exists by time of selection.
- close04 7y ago
  I’m as certain as I can be that few if any companies will be willing to invest (hundreds of) millions into projects to build some custom solution just to risk losing the bid in the end. And in top of that they would have a product that may have 0 demand elsewhere. Imagine if your employer told you they’ll hire you after you successfully deliver a project to test your worth. You’d think it’s a joke. And anyway most costs are incurred during the lifetime of the project, after you proved yours is the best solution, with endless change requests, delays that require additional money, etc. The companies bidding usually have far more experience at syphoning money than the client has at holding on to it.
  - miskin 7y ago
    This is true. What I see in my country is that initial product is maybe expensive, but still somehow acceptable. Problem is that, for some reason unknown to me, government does not gain rights to modify implemented solution and can't bring in another vendor to implement either next phase or do maintenance of the solution. And this introduces many years long vendor lock-in that pays off.
- saber6 7y ago
  > Preselection is hot garbage, as proven time and time again. Oh come on bro you don’t like the f35? ;)

imtringued 7y ago

I always wonder how these projects can be so expensive. Heck, they are so expensive you could just order two companies to deliver a product and pit them against each other so that there is a strong incentive to deliver a working product.

johannes1234321 7y ago
Such projects are expensive since it's not only development but also rollout including training of users. The development is also more expensive than in other areas since there is need for documentation. And then there is a flaw in the process: Producing the software has to be done via some bidding process. For writing the requirements documents they already rely on companies, which can add clauses making it hard for competitors, after that the lowest bidder wins. In case there is a competitor and not some big player like T-Systems as the only one the offers typically are "optimistic" meaning that at some point in time the budget will run out and extra budget has to be granted (or the project would fail, which doesn't look good and they'd have to restart the whole process, thus wait another two years) and there a "smart" company can find quite a few extra costs. ("Oh wait, you updated from windows XP to 10, we have to redo a lot and then re-twst and re-certify") It's a game some companies can play quite well. That all said: Software is expensive. Gathering requirements is hard. Bureaucracy, which among other things tries to prevent corruption, causes extra work.
- berkes 7y ago
  That, and they are expensive, because people expect them to be expensive. When, say, the national Police asks companies to come up with sofware to manage contact details for all employees, you could come up with "Install and Configure SomeOpenSourceCRM on a VPS" for €3000. Whereas typically some Enterprise Consultancy quotes a factor hundred of that to "integrate" it in a crappy way. I've worked in such projects, for governments. The overhead is ridiculous. the NIH-syndrome is rampant. The specs and "but this is how we do things"-requirements are cut in stone. Very often a evening of tuning some Open Source tool could suffice; But either some rule disallowing the language/server/deploy-speed, or some manager disliking it because last year they decided that from now on everything must be Java+XML, or you need at least three weeks of meetings before you are allowed to even start. This is not a joke. I've had a simple off-the-shelve Rails tool cut down, because "we don't allow dynamic languages". I've had projects delayed with 3+ weeks because "we require a deploy-window to be announced 21 days in advance" and I've worked as only developer on a project with four(!) managers managing me. That is why government projects are expensive: a catch22: "Because they are".

rorykoehler 7y ago

They don't have to do it. Just pay an established tech startup to do it via EU grants.

usrusr 7y ago

On the other hand, German public money had been the most important sponsor of GPG for quite a while. Unfortunately that stopped long ago, I guess all the reasons for that can be broken down to "it was too cheap" in one way or another... When you try to buy software like this through conventional state procurement mechanism you'll inevitably waste a lot of money, but it would be really cheap to "grow" it through supporting an environment where that can happen. Why doesn't Werner Koch have a position in academia? Third party funding of whole departments is commonplace and is always a blind bet trusting that the grantees will come up with something rewarding.

brazzy 7y ago

Do consider that you never read an article "obscure government IT project delivered fully working and only slightly delayed" because that isn't attention-grabbing enough for newspapers to bother with, not because it never happens.